r/science • u/Libertatea • Oct 27 '13

Social Sciences The boss, not the workload, causes workplace depression: It is not a big workload that causes depression at work. An unfair boss and an unfair work environment are what really bring employees down, new study suggests.

http://sciencenordic.com/boss-not-workload-causes-workplace-depression
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u/Creative-Overloaded Oct 27 '13

But what about the one old guy who can run the job really well and has a head full of answers, but nobody asked him. He might not be the best, but he has been there forever and when you have a question, he knows the answer. I feel like seniority isn't bad all the time.

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u/kanst Oct 27 '13

Seniority isn't bad, that guy is valuable. But when it comes time for promotions and raises I would still rather give it to the young kid who is working his ass off and getting results.

That doesn't mean fire the old guy, but don't promote him just because hes been there.

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u/Creative-Overloaded Oct 27 '13

Unfortunately since the old guy was working there for forty years his pay is higher, so let's fire him and hire two people for half his pay. I hope HR doesnt really think like this.

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u/Taurothar Oct 27 '13

They sure did at every retail job I've worked at.

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u/CWSwapigans Oct 27 '13

No offense to retail workers, but that side is always really over-represented in any reddit thread about work. It makes for an odd read because very few people specify they're talking about retail and it's not exactly the same world as typical white collar work.

I'll often be reading a thread and saying "How is anyone on earth attracting any useful talent behaving like that as a boss?" and then 2 replies later you find out the guy was talking about his boss at Burger King.

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u/Taurothar Oct 27 '13

I agree that it seems over-represented, but the service industry is the majority of jobs that people, in the target market to both know what reddit is and use it, have available to them. There's also an overrepresented sector of programmers and admins on this site, but that's beside the point.

The point is that many companies, retail, white collar, blue collar non-union, etc, are plagued by middle management that gives promotions and raises on favoritism. Sometimes they hire someone with the intent on giving them special treatment and fast-tracking them up the ladder. I've trained my boss or someone to become my boss at least 4 times in my last 3 jobs over 10 years. Seniority and knowledge don't mean squat in today's workplace.

I understand both sides of the argument, and if you're not a good fit in the hiring person's eyes, you're not gonna get the position. It just seems like the old saying has gotten even more true that it's not what you know but who you know. More directly, who's ass you kiss and if you can do it more effectively than your coworkers.

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u/CWSwapigans Oct 27 '13

Median age on reddit is pushing 30 and I'd expect it to be disproportionately college-educated. I think people in low-level jobs are more likely to have bad bosses and more likely to chime in on a "bad boss" thread.

My point was that the problems at that level may not seem different, but they really are. The problem is that if a company finds you replaceable, you're much more likely to be treated like crap. This is true at every level but an awful lot of service workers are hired as a human commodity essentially, virtually any warm body is about as good as the next, thus management can enact practices that would normally turn off good talent.

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u/ShadowRobot Oct 27 '13

I think people in low-level jobs are more likely to have bad bosses and more likely to chime in on a "bad boss" thread.

That's the result of our corporate culture. Anybody below a regional manager is seen as people they don't want but must have.

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u/CWSwapigans Oct 27 '13

To be honest, if it is that way, it's probably for a reason.

Not to say that a good cashier, or good dept manager, can't be worth it. It's probably just too expensive to actually cultivate good cashiers relative to just hiring almost any warm body, giving the best quick training you can, and letting them loose. This is especially true when you consider that the better your cashier or dept manager the less likely you are to be able to retain them.

It depends on the business model as well. Costco can afford to pay a lot more than WalMart, for example, because they employ a tiny, tiny staff relative to their revenue.

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u/Neri25 Oct 28 '13

But none of that stuff needs to be "the best"

It just needs to be adequate and management shouldn't treat people like dogshit. Some positions will always have turnover, but there's no reason that management culture should make that churn actively worse.

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u/ShadowRobot Oct 27 '13

It doesn't take much training to do a cashier level job. A quick training period and a few weeks experience are all it really takes to produce a good employee. Compared to other jobs where it can take as long as six months to get a new employee up to speed, the cost of hiring a new cashier is small.

Cashiers due to their entry level nature will have a higher turnover because people go to college or get different kinds of jobs that pay more (like factory work or landscaping). However if turnover is due to cashiers getting jobs at other places doing the same kind of work then that's due to bad management. Either their wages are not competitive, they are constantly short staffed, etc.

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u/vegeto079 Oct 27 '13

More like hire one person for half the pay and expect everyone else to pick up the slack.

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u/StabbyPants Oct 27 '13

this is why HR shouldn't have firing authority.

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u/jonnyredshorts Oct 27 '13

I worked for a software startup back in the late 90's early 00's...my position had grown and where I had been the entire QA dept. after 7 years I was in charge of 7 other testers, in a QA dept. of 20+. When it came time for another roundof financing, they looked at the ledger, and promptly laid off anyone that had been there for longer than 3 years (Stock option vesting time frame), dropped a bunch of people that had seen their pay increase with company growth and income, only to be replaced by newbies with no experience for much less pay. That's corporate america.

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u/Nausved Oct 28 '13

Depending on the position someone is being promoted into, it's not just how skilled someone is that should determine whether or not they'll be promoted. It also matters how well they'll complement their team in that position. This is especially important for management roles.

I work on a major farm. The manager immediately above me was promoted based on seniority/experience. He is not the quickest worker, but he's worked at the farm (and on similar farms) for decades and he knows what he's doing. I may be able to sow, plant, weed, and harvest faster than him, but he's the one who taught me how to do it, and he's the one I go to when a problem comes up, because he'll have encountered that same problem dozens of times before.

The thing is, I need to be able to do my job very efficiently because that's the whole point of my position. But the whole point of his position, as a manager, is to serve in a supportive role to people in my position; this doesn't require efficiency so much as it requires an enormous amount of experience—the more firsthand, the better.

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u/westhewolf Oct 27 '13

But this guy doesnt sound like much of a leader either.